THE blueprint drawn up by the WWF for Tasmania's forest industry provides a Third World solution to a First World problem.
The blueprint, in fact, is a betrayal of all the environmentalists who have marched in rain and shine to protest against the destruction of Tasmania's old-growth forests. But it also insults the members of the forest industry here, both state and private, by viewing their activities in the same light as the WWF would regard timber exploiters in Burma or Brazil.
A key to the report is its failure to tackle two contentious issues within the forestry debate _ woodchip exports and use of 1080 poison.
The WWF does not enjoy the same profile in Australia as it does in Britain, the rest of Europe and North America where its activities embrace environmental education, lobbying, and fund-raising.
The WWF, with funds derived from wildlife-lovers in cashed-up western, industrialised nations, concentrates its hands-on campaign to preserve endangered species in the developing world, where most of the threatened species now occur because of over-population and environmental degradation and exploitation.
In order to achieve maximum results in very difficult Third World situations on the ground, the WWF over the years has developed a policy of coercion and compromise to bring Third World politicians and business figures on board, many of them corrupt and often in league with poachers and exploiters of the environment.
The WWF success in helping save such species as the panda, the Siberian tiger and the white rhino, (to name just a few ``icon'' animals without forgetting lesser-known species like the Costa Rican white-bearded spider monkey) has been phenomenal. The WWF philosophy of saving what it can of the natural wonders of the world, sometimes at a price of settling for a less than ideal outcome, has paid off, even if at times it has involved rewarding the very people exploiting the environment in the first place.
However, the WWF is wrong to apply its policy of compromise, a policy formulated for despotic regimes and banana republics, to a First World, democratic country like Australia, and specifically to one of its states where it does not have representation.
The WWF - conceived in Britain in 1961 but now based in Switzerland with constituent, autonomous bodies in major countries, including Australia - may wishes to dictate forest policy to the Wilderness Society and other organisations fighting to end the Third World practices of woodchipping and clear-felling, but it would dare not intervene in similar situations in, say, Britain or the United States because they have their own powerful environmental groups on the ground.
To put WWF intervention in perspective, it would be like the WWF in Britain formulating a compromise formula for clearing the pine and silver birch woodlands of Thomas Hardy's Wessex to allow more land for building (an ongoing issue in Britain). Or, in California, agreeing to the clear-felling and woodchipping of redwoods, the world's tallest softwood trees, for export to Japan.
Although on the surface an attempt to end the impasse over forestry in Tasmania, which is threatening the state's image as a green tourist destination for foreigners, there are some glaring omissions in the WWF blueprint. The blueprint advocates the establishment of a national park for the Tarkine but ignores the Styx, the home to the tallest hardwood trees in the world and an area that deserves recognition.
Most importantly, and perhaps the biggest clue to where the WWF is coming from in terms of compromise, the blueprint ignores the woodchip export trade.
Woodchipping really puts Tasmania among the Third World nations, and the industry is almost a textbook example of how powerful importing nations dominate the weak with something to sell. For woodchips you can read cocoa, coffee, tea or tin as mere commodities to be traded on international commodity markets, raw materials to be sold in bulk at prices that do not represent their true worth, to be processed downstream, where the benefits of employment and high wages will apply. Often, and into the bargain for the commodity importers, finished products are sold back to the commodity country of origin.
In the entire report, all 60 pages of it, the word "woodchip" only appears three times, although the WWF makes clear it would prefer to see old-growth logs going for woodchips turned to more profit in Tasmania. The WWF is strong on downstreaming in local mills, something advocated in Tasmania for years, even if many Tasmanians themselves accept that some of this timber would have to come from old-growth forests, as long as they were diverted from woodchips.
Regarding old-growth forests themselves, the term appears to make the WWF nervous and it prefers to refer to "land-clearing". The WWF points out it is opposed to landclearing for conversion to other uses, like agriculture, and says "forest management cannot be summarised by catchwords like "clearfelling" or "old-growth forest"."
The WWF appears unaware of the fact that clearfelling and old-growth are extremely emotive terms in Tasmania, which ideally sum up what is happening to our forests.
In the WWF's opinion, if you fell a forest and plant the same trees that were on the site before the felling process this does not constitute a change in land use. This WWF view ignores the fact that a neat regrowth forest, with trees all the same size in blocks, does not constitute an environment that is beneficial to wildlife including all the bird species, some of them endemic to Tasmania like the strong-billed and black-headed honeyeaters, that require old trees for nesting sites and for insect food.
The blueprint is also notable for avoiding the contentious issue of 1080 poisoning of wildlife in areas that have been planted with saplings after clearance.
The blueprint also gives support for the extension of plantations on agricultural land, another contentious issue in the state.
That Tasmania retains its Third World image is not entirely the fault of people who try to dictate events here from outside, like the WWF.
To appreciate how others view us, one only has to look at the Tasmania motor vehicle number plate and see that it carries the emblem of an animal, the thylacine, hunted to extinction within living memory. The number plate is straight out of a banana or woodchip republic, as is the example of forestry workers being given paid time off work to defend government economic policy. The forestry workers, on their march through Launceston earlier this year, were even given placards - hundreds if not thousands of them - made by their employers, the cost of the placards no doubt put down as a tax-deductable expense to be paid for ultimately by the taxpayer.
The WWF, the world's second biggest environmental group after Greenpeace with five million financial supporters, has clearly gone to great effort and expense to compile its report on Tasmania but it shouldn't be surprised if it fails to win over all Tasmanians.
If it wants to discover the extent of the forestry problem in Tasmania, beyond an obvious scarred landscape and the seemingly endless lines of logtucks clogging Tasmania's main and rural roads, it should go into the diminishing surviving forests and look for Tasmania's four robin species...
They are all vanishing, to such an alarming extent that a researcher is conducting a survey to establish just how many are left, and how they can be saved.
Journalist DON KNOWLER writes the On The Wing bird column for The Mercury
RAPID RESPONSE EMAIL: What do you think?
If you bounce,
tuffinlindsay@hotmail.com
Monday, August 9, 2004